Clampdown On Judges: 'Buhari’s Govt In A Realm Of Madness'

The Akwa Ibom state Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice, Barr. Uwemedimo Nwoko, in this interview monitored in Uyo, lambasts President Muhammadu Buhari over the commando style invasion of houses of Justices and Judges last weekend, decrying that the country was slowly descending into anarchy. Excerpts:

What can you say about the arrest of the Supreme Court Judges by the DSS?

In a normal situation, Buhari ought to have resign by now assuming that he didn’t know what happened. But if he knew what happened, then the National Assembly should impeach him. As it stands, we threatening the very foundation of the existence of the democratic setting in Nigeria; we are threatening the existence of Nigeria nation coming together.

The DSS has bitten far more than it can chew. The Buhari administration has now gone into the realm of madness. This is insanity at the highest level – a pure insanity. There is nothing that can justify the invasion of the houses of judges – sitting judges and justices of the highest court of Nigeria – in the middle of the night up to a point that some human beings, whatever was their motivation, could pull down the walls of the door of the judges’ house and enter. I would like to know, this is a pure manipulation, but every sensible person will know that the whole thing was planned, executed, it is a script that was written and some actors brought to act it out.

Let me give you a very clear example of what I’m saying, these hooligans that invaded the houses of justices in the middle of the night said that they went with a search warrant as the case may be. Under the law, if you want to execute a search warrant in any premises, you first of all go and present the search warrant to the occupants of that premises, you surrender yourself to be searched first and identify the number of people that are coming into the premises for the search warrant. All of them who will enter the premises will be searched to be sure that they are not carrying anything that can be incriminating against the occupants of that premises, before you are allowed to enter. And there is no time you will enter any part of the premises without being followed; and at the end of the search, you must stand out there and take a full inventory of what was discovered there, and the document signed. Now, let’s come back to Nigeria under Buhari; how many people went to the judges’ houses? Who searched them before they entered? At the end of their search, where is the record of the inventory? Who signed it? I don’t whether you have had the task of having to count N5 million before, even if it is in N1,000 bills. If you are given N5 million or N10 million to count, I don’t know how many hours it will take you to count if you don’t have a counting machine. These criminals went into the houses of justices between 1a.m and 4a.m and they came out with the record of having found more than N300 million, all counted in the night. These are not bankers, they didn’t go there with counting machines, but they know the figure that they found. Within three hours, they had finished counting and gave the fraction of the figures in Naira, Pounds, Dollars, etc. you can tell this to the horse marines, but every child would begin to ask certain questions that would puncture this balloon that they are frying. Who counted the money? How did they come with the figures? Obviously, these people left their offices with the money they are claiming to have recovered from the judges’ houses. It is the money they went with, and they knew the figure they carried that is why they were able to announce it even as they left the houses. Who found it? Who took the inventory? Who followed them around? How many people entered the houses and what time? Buhari thinks that we are all stupid.

Barrister, following the advent of this administration at the federal level, it’s been back and forth to resolve the war at the Senate, bending the rules, etc and till today, we the only thing we hear is that federal government has withdrawn the case. Following what you are saying that these could be a witch-hunt antics, can you expanciate?

Analysing your sentence, I will remove the word ‘could’ and put the word ‘is’, because I don’t want to live in the realm of speculation. This is witch-hunting. It is a manifested witch-hunting, and we don’t have to mince words about it. I’m talking about the attack on the National Assembly leadership because people they did not want were elected by members of the National Assembly and so they became enemies. You are talking about the judicial system, all those who have given judgement in favour of the APC government are saints. Anybody that sat on the panel that delivered a judgement that didn’t favour APC is an enemy.